Electron while you look: ๐
When you don't look: 
this post was submitted on 02 May 2024
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And now I'm imagining the boos from Mario. ๐คช
Now that is some MSN emoji shit I can get behind. Do I even dare ask how it's done?
This reminds me I need to clean my PC's fan filter
It do be like this sometimes ngl lol
You make it look like an innocent peek changes the outcome. In reality you "look" by shooting lasers perpendicular to the plane and observe the electron photon scattering. I wonder if your path changes if I shoot military-grade lasers in your direction.
This is the reason I never understood it at first. People tell you about it, but tend to leave out the key part to actually understanding it. Why?
But aren't the lasers already being fired regardless if you're looking or not
Can someone explain please? We had this in school, but my friend here forgot what this was about.
It's the Young's double slit experiment. It proves that light (or electrons, or even small bacteria) is both a particle and a wave.
There is a quirk of quantum mechanics. When you observe a system, you fundamentally change it. In scientific terms "observe" has a very different meaning to layman usage. This leads to a lot of woo around the topic. In practice, observing is measuring. In quantum mechanics, the measurement system is of the same scale as the system being measured.
Imagine observing a good train, by bouncing BB bullets off it with a gun. That is classical measurement. You can assume the BBs had no effect on the train.
Now imagine the same measurement. However you are measuring how a bunch of glass playing cards are balanced in a house of cards. You can tell a lot still, but the BBs will smash it up doing so. This is quantum measurements.
In the first, the observer is independent of the system. In the second, the observer is a fundamental part of the system, and so can change its way of functioning.
Another classic case of "Scientists are bad at naming things"
Some people will spend their entire lives thinking math is stupid because of imaginary numbers.
Thinking that electrons behave differently when you "look" at them.
Think that radio towers and microwaves cause cancer because they emit radiation
Many of these are failures of the education system and to be fair scientists don't have the power of hindsight. Still it annoys me how inefficient it is having these names
The problem with how you are describing it is that it's not that the physical mechanics of measurement are necessarily causing collapse as if you end up erasing the persistent information about the measurement it reverses the collapse, such as if you add a polarizer to the other slit as well or add a polarizer downstream that untags the initial measurement.
So in your example, if you simultaneously shoot a bunch of BBs at empty space next to the pile of glass cards where they could have been, or discard the BBs which reflected measuring the cards in the first place, suddenly the pile of glass cards reassemble themselves.
Attempts to try and dismiss the 'weirdness' of the measurement problem or QM behavior IMO ultimately do the reader more of a disservice than a service.
I'm massively simplifying, and a lot of the interesting stuff gets lost with that. Unfortunately, when you try and maintain that, the analogy gets so convoluted that it's useless.
The actual answer for understanding quantum mechanics is to chunk the maths, again, and again... and again. It also involves working almost entirely in the wave dominant domains. Trying to simplify that down to a quick comment is basically impossible.
This is such a mindfuck, the implications are really weird, like WTF is this universe actually made of?
This is not how the double slit experiment works though. "Observe", in quantum physics should be read as "interacts with a thing", it doesn't require a conscious observer.
I know, but still it's totally weird.
I have a friend whose research requires a thorough understanding of quantum mechanics. She told me that she feels like she understands quantum mechanics, until she stops and thinks about it in a way that isn't limited to the equations and data that she's used to manipulating. Then, it blows her mind so much that she feels like she has to sort of "reboot" her brain and tell herself "it's okay, just don't think about it too much bro". I find this hilarious, and quite relatable (even though I know relatively little of quantum mechanics)
Think about it this way: a frog dies when you observe its organs.
No. If that was how it worked it would be impossible to perform the double slit experiment with anything larger than a single fundamental particle, but that is demonstrably not the case. It would also be impossible to perform it in a gravitational field - or any field, for that matter.
The truth is that you cannot talk about what the double slit experiment 'means' without going into discussion of interpretations of quantum mechanics.
Waves
When the wall socket is just out of reach in the dark
Wave Particle Reality=The Flash
This is an old one, but it makes me happy every single time.
This is a wonderful post.
repost